‘BBC’: Why’s P*rn So Weird About Black Guys?
It’s no secret that porn is…weird about Black guys. I mean, mainstream American culture is, too, don’t get me wrong. But the obsession with Black men’s dicks (that comes up all the time in mainstream TV and edgy comedy) is most starkly evident in the world of adult media. It’s hard to scroll on any tube site for more than a few seconds without seeing a Black guy referred to as “BBC” and that term’s just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of porn out there that features Black men has at least some element stereotyping them or drawing attention to their race as a marketing point. In the world of kinky porn that I’m most familiar with, genres like sissification and small penis humiliation often make the fetishizing of Black men very explicit and almost impossible to avoid. So, let’s talk about the term “BBC,” how Black men and their images are treated in porn, and the history of where all of this came from. Warning: This article gets pretty upsetting, discussing racist violence and anti-blackness. Please proceed with caution.
BBC: Just Another Search Term?
Image from pornhub.com/insights
To unpack “BBC” it’s useful to think about the context in which the term was popularized. Tube sites like PornHub run on simple, well-known search terms. That’s how posters are able to find an audience and that’s how viewers are able to get to what they want to see quickly. When you’re rushing to get off before bed, you’re going to want quick and easy tags that will get you what you’re looking for. For some people that’s roleplay dynamics like teacher/student or step daddy/step son (check out my article on fauxcest to learn more about the popularity of those scenes). For some that’s activities like spanking or tickling. For many, though, it’s certain body types and, often, the archetypes/tropes that go along with them in the minds of many. That’s where terms like “MILF,” “BBW,” “Tgirl,” “Teen,” and, yes, “BBC” come in.
These search terms, so necessary for navigating the world of online porn, tend to take on a bit of a life of their own. “MILF” literally stands for “Mom I’d Like To Fuck,” but in practice it more means an archetype and ‘look.’ People searching “MILF” generally expect to see big breasted, (hypothetically) older women, probably paired with younger costars. “Tgirl” is just slang for transgender women, but when people search the term they’re probably specifically expecting feminine young women with penises. Girls who haven’t medically transitioned at all or who have had bottom surgery to get a pussy might have less success marketing under that term. Practically any broad category of person that some people find hot has a term like this. So, in cultures like the US where most people aren’t Black, it makes sense that Black men would have their own special little acronym to be marketed under, and that that term would end up taking on other associations. That wouldn’t be an issue in itself. Unfortunately, the term “BBC,” the tropes associated with it, and how it’s used have deep roots in racism and cause harm in ways that might not seem immediately intuitive to all.
Do Black Men Really Have ‘BBC’s?
Collage of stock images from Canva
As you probably know, ‘BBC’ stands for “Big Black Cock.” Porn tends to be pretty obsessed with big dicks to begin with, so the acronym isn’t that strange on the face of it. In a vacuum, it would be a totally neutral term. As acclaimed adult star, filmmaker and master fetish trainer King Noire put it when chatting with me “Just saying ‘big black dick’ or ‘big black cock’ is not particularly racist, right? But it’s what’s behind it is where the racist shit comes in.”
It’s a common stereotype that Black men have exceptionally large penises. In reality, no matter how much money gets pumped into investigating this topic, the results keep coming back pretty much the same. As urologist Aaron Spitz said in The Penis Book (2018): "when you really take a good look at the naked data, there's not a whole lot there.” Even if it were true that on average Black men’s dicks were longer, another obvious truth, as King pointed out to Holly Randall, is “across the entire race of Black folk there’s all types of dicks.”
Even though Black men have penises of all sizes (and the average is just about the same size as anyone else’s), the myth of Black men’s above average endowment has survived centuries. It’s a seductive idea because of what it symbolizes: that Black men are more primally horny, sexually aggressive, masculine, and desirable to women.
Why’s ‘BBC’ Porn So Popular?
The horny stereotypes about Black men are seductive to many, and it’s not hard to understand why. A lot of people who like to be fucked by men, especially white people, get turned on by the idea of a special kind of guy who wants them more than most men do. Who can fuck better and fill them up more than the average guy. Because it can be so stigmatized for white women especially to even engage with Black men casually (let alone date or sleep with them), there can also be an element of mystery and the taboo. A lot of white women have simply never been intimate with a Black man, so it’s easy for stereotypes to run rampant in the world of fantasy with no real basis in reality. Rather than being about any specific Black man’s attractiveness, the stereotype of Black masculinity will take on a life of its own in some people’s fantasies.
For non-Black men who are interested in women, there can be a similar fascination that stems from a mix of mystery and jealousy. If Black men really are more sexually voracious, competent and well-endowed, and you’re a man who’s not Black…what does that say about you? In the world of porn that comes out a lot in the context of cuckolding and humiliation porn. Black men are used to symbolize “true” masculinity in a lot of sissification porn, for example, to contrast with the (usually) white sissy’s “failed masculinity.” Black men populate a lot of white people’s cuckolding fantasies, too, as the “bulls” who unfaithful wives wander off to. And, if you’re as into small penis humiliation as I am, you’ve definitely seen a lot of porn where, whether race is explicitly mentioned or not, smaller pale penises are compared to larger darker toned ones.
A “Good” Stereotype?
For some Black men the stereotype feels flattering, too, or at least lucrative. No stereotype is good exactly, but, as King Noire puts it “That’s one of the only positive stereotypes that we have, you know what I’m saying? So a lot of us hold onto that shit.” It can feel good to be desirable or sexually intriguing to people, especially when you’re generally disempowered. I think a lot of women and trans people can relate to that.
The way Black men’s blackness is stereotyped and fetishized can also give them possibilities in the world of sex work that other men don’t necessarily have. As Mireille Miller-Young and Xavier Livermon discuss in their article “Black Stud, White Desire,” Black men are one of the main demographics hired to top women. Cuckolding, a kink and sometimes line of work that’s almost entirely populated by Black men, is a way many break into sex work, including fan favorites like King Noire and Dredd.
Black men can also sometimes be scouted aggressively for the straight adult industry compared to white men. Just comparing Dredd’s interview with Holly Randall to Codey Steele the contrast is crazy. While Codey, a white performer, describes breaking into the industry as a tiring slog, Dredd details how an agent called him repeatedly for months until he finally relented and agreed to shoot a scene. (You can read more about his experience getting into porn here). Needless to say, many Black men have mixed feelings about the mythology of the “BBC,” at least if they can perform what’s expected of that stereotype.
The Horrifying Origins Of ‘BBC’
Unfortunately, there’s a reason people say there’s no such thing as a “good” stereotype. The myth that Black men are sexual powerhouses, endlessly horny, and exceptionally well endowed didn’t emerge in a vacuum: it was created intentionally to justify not just enslavement, but the brutal sexual and physical violence imposed on Black men throughout history.
As King discussed with me, white slavers would judge Black men by their penis size: “people just thought if you had a bigger dick you’d make more babies for [them] to sell.” He talked about the same topic with Holly Randall on her podcast in 2023. “On these breeding plantations you would have [enslaved Black boys] who would be expected to impregnate a certain amount of girls,” in order to produce commodified children for the slave owners. “When a white man would go look to purchase a Black man at the auction block [...] they would look and try to find big penises because they thought ‘that person has a more likely ability to impregnate more people.’”
The myth of Black men’s big dicks and sexual appetite wasn’t just about the literals of sexual exploitation during enslavement; It also served a narrative purpose by connecting Black people with animals. The more white folks could imagine Black people as less than human, the easier for the enslavers to feel comfortable perpetuating abuse. Racist science made it easy for white people to imagine Black folks weren’t as human as them even after slavery ended, as we can see clearly in writing like William Lee Howard’s “The Negro As A Distinct Ethnic Factor In Civilization” published in 1905.
In the West, it’s common to think of the body and mind as separate and conflicting. We think of rationality and the mind as pretty synonymous, and sexuality as a base, “lower” bodily function. Because of this, imagining Black people as animalistic inherently tied them to sexuality. This has affected Black people of all genders significantly. For Black men in particular, it’s resulted in this stereotype of being big dicked and perpetually horny, especially for white women.
Where Do White Women Fit Into All Of This?
In this scene from Mel Brook’s Blazing Saddles (1974), friends Jim and Bart lure Klan members by Bart playing into their belief that Black men are all obsessed with white women
Porn tropes about Black men don’t just characterize them as sexually voracious and hung, though. There’s a particular fascination with Black men fucking white women. In mainstream media, explicit engagement with this idea has died down a bit (or at least become more subtle or hidden in the shadows), with the easiest examples I can think of being from older comedies like Airplane! (1980) and Blazing Saddles (1974). In porn, though, “IR” is alive and well as a genre.
Of course, it’s not racist for Black men to fuck white women. As King Noire said during our talk “It’s beautiful to see all kinds of people with each other. To me, that’s the porn world I want to live in, where everybody can work together and support each other.” We should be able to “understand the differences that we do have and be able to celebrate them. [...] We should just be two people having sex on camera” Still, the adult industry historically has not treated scenes with Black men and white women a random possibility within the grab bag of human pairings. Instead, it’s been labeled “IR” (for “interracial”) and treated as extra dirty in and of itself.
It was the norm, at least until recently, for white female performers to treat “IR” as some sort of career hurtle, like their first anal or first gang bang, to be held out for and marketed as a big step. “The hype around IR is what was a culture shock to me,” AVN’s 2024 Male Performer Of The Year Isiah Maxwell shared on Holly Randall Unfiltered in 2020, “People would put off doing IR for years [...] with the hopes of prolonging their careers.” While OnlyFans and the rise of independent content creation, this expectation has shifted a bit. Still, the idea persists that it’s somehow dirtier for white women to perform with Black men.
Acclaimed performer Isiah Maxwell, photo from PornCrush.com
Agencies have historically put “IR” (which is to say, sex with Black men) as a checkable box on talent’s forms. As in, are you willing to allow your body to be fucked by a Black man, the way you might be willing to be fucked in the ass or receive a facial — as if sex with a Black man is a whole different sexual act as sex with any other guy. That’s something Isiah takes understandable issue with: “The paperwork they give the models in the beginning shouldn’t have interracial on there. They should just decide if they want to work with that person or not based off of doing their research on who the male talent is.” When female talent do choose to be open to “IR,” they have often been encouraged to set higher rates, as if sex with a Black man is somehow a more difficult or degrading task than sex with anyone else. “Everybody should just be on an equal playing field,” Isiah says definitively.
What Made ‘IR’ Such A Big Deal?
It should be no surprise to any readers at this point that all this mystique around Black men fucking white women has its roots in American history. It might be unexpected, though, that this particular piece of racist cultural baggage came less from slavery and more from reconstruction and Jim Crow: the time after the Civil war as Black people tried to integrate into broader American society and were brutally suppressed and segregated at every turn.
As George M. Fredrickson outlined in his book The Black Image in the White Mind (1972), one tactic used to defend the institution of slavery as it neared its end was racist science that claimed Black men had a “dual nature.” According to that idea, Black men were docile and harmless while strictly controlled by whites, but afflicted by uncontrollable sexual fits when left to their own devices. This began what’s been called the “Rape Myth.” Diane Miller Sommerville describes it in Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (2004). That myth thought of Black men as bestial sexual predators who were biologically programmed to mindlessly sexually assault white women specifically.
Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley weeps over her deceased son at his funeral. He was brutally slaughtered over allegations that he whistled at a white woman. He was fourteen when he was killed. His mother chose an open casket funeral, despite his mutilation, to show the world what had been done to him in graphic detail. Photo: AP
Despite being absurd and unfounded, this powerful lie was used to justify not only segregation and discrimination but also the terrorism against Black communities that peaked in the early to mid-20th Century and continues to this day. Euphemistically titled “Race Riots,” mass public tortures and lynchings were all blamed on the supposedly predatory sexuality of Black men. As Fredrickson showed, even white figures supposedly opposed to this violence thought of the Rape Myth as unquestionable truth, begging the white public to “consider the provocation” behind lynchings. It was considered common sense at the time, with practically everyone in white society simply ‘knowing’ Black men had an insatiable lust for white women and girls.
It was a really fucked up lie to spread. It hurt Black folks the worst. Countless innocent men and boys were brutally killed because of this lie, with fourteen year old Emmett Till being the most famous victim. As if it could get any grosser, it’s worth noting that the horror white society found in these supposed rapes was not even the violation of white women’s consent. As Jonathan Katz talked about in his book The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995), the issue wasn’t white women’s safety or bodily autonomy, it was the perceived destruction of white men’s property. Any sex before marriage reduced the value of a white woman in the eyes of society at the time, but even consensual sex with a Black man was considered worse than death.
The Racism Was Pornographic From The Start
In this still from The Birth Of A Nation (1915), Gus (played by a white man in blackface) accosts the teenage Flora
The Rape Myth was and is a disgusting political tool used to justify violence, yet from the beginning, it’s also, secretly, been something else: horny. As Jacquelyn Dowd Hall described in Revolt Against Chivalry (1974), the gruesome lies circulated in the early 20th Century were a form of “folk pornography.” They were often salacious and scandalous. Loads of books were created full of these detailed stories, supposedly as ‘cautionary tales’ for white women. They described Black men’s penises as so large that white women could not physically handle them (hey, there’s ‘BBC’ again). One particularly gruesome story even described the Black rapist having to cut the victim open in order to penetrate her.
Even The Birth Of A Nation (1915), the infamously racist film which served to repopularize the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, had a kind of porn-y element. The film features a scene in which a young innocent white girl is pursued by a Black would-be rapist. The film language of this scene is noticeably titillating, with long lingering shots that emphasize the white girl’s youth and innocence and give ample time for the viewer to imagine what might happen to her. In fact, the scene is eerily reminiscent of tropes in modern porn.
It’s really not hard to draw the lines between all of this and modern cuck porn archetypes, white women with spade tattoos and the Piper Peri meme that was so big a few years back.
King Noire: performer, filmmaker, educator, master fetish trainer, and outspoken critic of racism in the Adult industry
Can Women Be “Blacked”?
This is also connected to the issue some performers have with “Blacked.” That term implies a sort of blackening, a white woman being forever altered by sex with Black men. King Noire feels very strongly about this subject. “To say someone is ‘Blacked’ is a racist term,” he states unambiguously, “Before she was with a Black man she wasn’t ‘Blacked.’ Now she’s with a Black man and she’s stained, soiled, and sullied by having this.”
Whether or not a white woman has ever been with a Black man has a “symbolic power” to white men because of the way our racist history has conditioned them to think. It “makes them think that you’re dirty or something is wrong with you or your vagina has changed.” It isn’t a dick size thing, since plenty of white dicks are bigger than plenty of Black dicks. “In their minds, all Black men have dicks that will ruin a white woman. It’s so crazy.” Although the studio Blacked has women of many ethnic backgrounds on now, for a long time it was all white women, playing into the erotic thrill folks have for breaking this taboo that’s been passed down to us — playing with the idea that Black men soil white women with sexual contact.
The Bathwater Has Some Babies
Sean Michaels and Silvia Saint in an iconic photo by Suze Randall in 2001
Knowing the background of where ‘BBC’ and ‘IR’ came from, the adult industry and those of us within it are faced with a bit of a dilemma. These terms and the tropes they point to aren’t being used, generally speaking, out of conscious, malicious racism. No, as Isiah Maxwell said to Holly “The product that we put out has always been reflective of what sells.” Like any other media, porn reflects the biases, stereotypes and structural inequities that affect all aspects of our culture. As Sean Michaels, 30+ year veteran of the Adult industry and groundbreaking performer said on Holly Randall Unfiltered “racism in America, and unfortunately probably the world, is institutionalized and engrained in our societies. Period.” We can play wack-a-mole with specific terms like ‘BBC’ and ‘IR,’ but our desires will always be affected by the power structures we live inside and, at least under capitalism, the media that’s mass produced and distributed will cater to what desires the market contains.
Holly Randall and Ricky Johnson pose during their interview on Holly Randall Unfiltered
It’s difficult for many performers to whole heartedly denounce porn that plays on racist myths because, as it currently stands, that’s how most Black men in the industry can find work. Dredd was hired to be “the next Blackzilla.” Isiah Maxwell told Holly that without Blacked and Dog Fart “half of the male talent that you love and learn about in this industry” wouldn’t have the careers they have today. Ricky Johnson, Brazzer’s first Black contract star, has talked about how conflicted he feels discussing racist tropes in the industry. “I can’t knock that it has allowed me to get into the position I’m in now,” he told Holly Randall “There’s a lot of people who are in positions where if they were to speak up about it they would lose work.” Even King, an outspoken critic of studios like Blacked, admits “If you’re a Black man and you’re a performer, I hear they pay well. It’s an opportunity.”
How Do We Move Forward?
King Noire and Jet Setting Jasmine, award winning performers, filmmakers, and owners of Royal Fetish Films
Still, there is a way to move forward into a brighter future without denouncing all that’s come before. “The answer, in my opinion,” Sean Michaels shared with Holly “is giving people the opportunity to prove themselves as much as opportunities are given to white individuals.” The more Black performers are offered roles and positions outside of ‘BBC’ and ‘IR' scenes, the more our collective erotic imaginations can evolve past these narrow, repetitive, reductive tropes. When Black men are given space to produce, write, and direct as well as perform, we see, as Sean puts it “real Black visions, not what [...] they think Black culture is.” He goes on, “We are Black, right? So we know what it is to be Black. Give us the opportunity to show the world through our art what it’s like, too.” Those opportunities are the least the industry can do to show “appreciat[ion] for the many billions of dollars that we’ve created for this industry,” he later added vie email.
What we see from the people who have been able to achieve these opportunities proves the validity of Sean’s perspective. King Noire is a fantastic example. His work with his wife Jet Setting Jasmine with their company Royal Fetish Films is groundbreaking. To paraphrase King, their art together has made it possible for Black people to see themselves participating in fetish in porn rather than just being the fetish. Their work to decolonize porn, kink, and pleasure isn’t just some buzzword. They learn about the kink and sexual practices that existed in cultures before colonization and remix them into new visions for liberated sexuality. They fight back against the false narratives that queerness and sexual joy are European inventions tarnishing other cultures. Black freedom of erotic expression does more than erase racist tropes that harm us all; it paints, collages, and expands beyond the boundaries of what seems possible. It forges the future of porn.
